Use Three Quality Management Techniques on Your Project

A lire sur:  Tenstep

Here are three techniques you can use on your project today.

Stress That Quality is Everyone's Responsibility

The project manager has overall responsibility for the quality management process. However, even if you have specific people who have responsibilities for quality, project quality is not the responsibility of one or two people. It is everyone's responsibility. All of the team, including the customer, has a stake in ensuring that the deliverables produced are of high quality. Everyone is also responsible for surfacing ideas for improvement to the processes used to create the deliverables.

Make Sure Quality is a Mindset, Not an Event

On some projects, quality is seen as a particular step in the process, or perhaps a series of activities at the end of the process. However, to be effective, the team needs to adopt a continuous quality mindset. Project quality starts with planning but the execution of quality must be carried out throughout the project. A multifaceted approach to quality will include the following items: 

• Establishing a Quality Management Plan early in the project
• Building quality into the team (training, communication, etc.)
• Building quality into the work processes (analysis, design, etc.)
• Building quality into project management deliverables
• Building quality into project deliverables

Team members need to take ownership of the deliverables that they produce and ensure that the deliverables are built with quality when they are first created.

Use Quality Control to Validate the Quality of your Deliverables

Quality control activities are those that are focused on checking the deliverable being produced. Depending on the type of project, the following activities are examples of quality control activities.

• Deliverable reviews /  peer reviews / technical reviews / code reviews. 
• Checklists to ensure that deliverables are consistent and contain all the necessary information.
• Standards to ensure consistency
• Thorough testing. Testing is one aspect of quality control that is most used today. Even though there are many techniques that build in quality further up front in the project, the confidence you have in the overall quality most likely comes from your testing.

Of course, there are many other quality management techniques as well, but these are three that can help most any project.